Are you paying attention?

Are you paying a t t e n t i o n ?

Think about walking through a park or down the city sidewalk. Are you paying attention to what’s around you, or are you simply focused on the next thing, the next task to check off the list, or what you’ll make for dinner?

When our attention is focused on what is in front us now, when we acknowledge it and forget everything else momentarily, we are being present to it - we are paying attention to this little snapshot of life.

Being in the moment, we find our Center. We allow ourselves the space to embody a sense of calm amidst the stresses of the day or life in any given moment...

But there’s more to it.

Something happens when we take that time to give our undivided attention to what lies before us.

We heal.

Each time we pay attention to the sensations of our present moment, we heal.

What we are healing can be conscious or subconscious, buried deep within.

Every time we pay attention to, acknowledge, and really feel whatever is in front of us - whether beauty or pain, whether it conjures joy or sorrow or even anxiety - each manifestation of life we put our attention to and feel, we heal.

The roses just beginning to bloom, a butterfly floating by, fluttering it’s beautiful wings, the crunch of snow beneath your feet as you walk in the winter time, paying attention those things heals us.

The piece of pottery we took hours to create laying on the floor broken to pieces, or the unexpected ending of a job or friendship... Or even the task you’ve been putting off because it evokes anxiety.

Paying attention to these moments, these little points on our human experience not only heal us, they teach us to pay more attention.

Paying attention breaks the pattern of avoidance.

We've been conditioned to avoid; to keep going no matter what. We have been conditioned to ignore the beautiful simplicity of life over experiencing the beauty in everything that is around us. Yet we are surrounded in creation.

Avoidance only keeps the feeling and emotions of whatever it is hovering in our body. Avoidance doesn’t move us forward, rather it keeps us sinking deeper into right where we are.

Attention helps us move through it; to experience the fullness of whatever it is before us and brings us to deeper understanding and knowing; a deeper understanding and knowing of ourselves.

Each of these moments when we put our attention to are healing moments.

Paying attention means we pause, notice, acknowledge and feel it. This is how we arrive at awareness. From awareness, we glean wisdom. Integrating the wisdom we experience our healing.

In this process, we are reconnecting the fibres of life. We are repairing the separation of ourselves from the nature of all living things when we acknowledge other life, and other creations from life.

Through that process of paying attention, we gradually remember that we are a part of it.

This is also why paying attention is so healing.

It's our lack of attention, our avoidance, our escape from it all - in the doing, in the busy-ness, in the jumping form task to task - that keeps us from living life full out, that keeps us disconnected from who we are in our natural way of being, because we have put our attention everywhere else but on what is right in front of us.

Our attention provides the evidence we are not alone.

The more attention I give to the beautiful simplicities of life, the more connected I feel to everything around me.

The more connected I feel to all creation, the more I heal, and the more whole I feel.

i love you.

Trish xo